Last week we thought about knowing God as provident, both in a general sense and a special one. The underlying and guiding principle in divine providence is that God is purposeful. God desires that we know Him as purposeful, so He has revealed Himself as such. God is pursuing His ultimate purpose to gain for Himself an eternal family who will enjoy and worship Him both now and forever. God’s active providence in the world goes hand in hand with the pursuit of His purposes.
Faith acknowledges that above and beyond life’s mysteries, God is at work pursuing His purposes for His creation and for our lives. We get glimpses of His purposefulness in His covenants and promises to Israel, as well as in prophetic messages conveyed through His prophets.
That God dealt in a special way with Israel was indicative that He had in mind a plan in which a chosen people were to play a vital part. God furnished a wider view of His purposefulness in the mission and message brought by Jesus. Jesus came because God was in pursuit of His plan to gather a forgiven and redeemed community to be His very own.
The ‘must’
We recently experienced the Easter season and with it a renewed focus on Jesus’ resurrection. In heaven’s explanation delivered by angels about the resurrection, an emphasis was placed on the divine necessity for it. Speaking to the first eyewitnesses visiting the empty tomb, the angelic message called for those eyewitnesses to remember what Jesus had said: “The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and the third day rise again” (Luke 24:7). In that message was the “must” — God’s purposefulness.
We might think of divine providence as the hidden force at work achieving divine purposefulness, both in an individual believer’s life and in God’s overarching goal of fashioning a people for His own possession in time and into eternity. As His purpose relates to our lives as Christians, God intends to conform us to the likeness of Christ through spiritual growth now and final transformation or completion when Christ returns. It is this vein that 1 John 3:2 affirms: “Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be but we know that when He is revealed we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”
Still to come
In addition to God’s purpose for His redeemed people, the Bible points to His wider purpose affecting the whole created order. The Bible speaks in 2 Peter 3:10 of a future day of the Lord “in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up.” However, as we know, the Bible does not end on that sad and fearful note. Rather it ends with a vision of “a new heaven and a new earth” in which a holy city descends from God “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”
The glad sequel to the vision of God’s ultimate purpose for a new heaven and new earth is spelled out in a loud voice from heaven, which was heard to say, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God” (Rev. 21:1–3).
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